I See You Big German: Dirk Nowitzki and Dallas

By Zac Crain

This book release is timed to coincide with retiring Nowitzky’s jersey, so we expect a lot of interest from basketball fans in Dallas and beyond. The book is based on author Crain’s years-long essay series for the Dallas Morning News: “I See You, Big German,” which has a built-in fanbase. Will appeal to readers of similarly smart, passionate, subject-driven cultural histories like Hanif Abdurraqib's Go Ahead in the Rain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: La Reunion Publishing
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781646050369

Book preview

1

A Pessimist Comes to America

That game was the biggest thing in my life, you’d say later.

March 28, 1998, was your grand opening, your official introduction to the basketball world. The USA Basketball Junior National Select Team was facing off against a squad of players from around the world at the (somewhat confusingly named) Alamo Stadium Gymnasium in San Antonio. The fourth annual Nike Hoop Summit was meant to be a showcase for high schoolers Al Harrington and Rashard Lewis, both expected to skip college and jump straight to the NBA. And the two American players held up their end, Harrington scoring twenty-six points (the most by a homegrown player at the Hoop Summit to that point) and Lewis adding eighteen and a record four steals.

But they were overshadowed by a lanky kid with floppy hair and broad shoulders and a name no one could seem to pronounce or even spell correctly—several times on the ESPN broadcast it appeared as Nowitzski. You were only nineteen years old then and had snuck out of Germany to be there, with your club team, the Würzburg X-Rays, on the verge of promotion from the second division in the Basketball Bundesliga. You had almost backed out of the trip for that reason; you didn’t want to disappoint anyone. But you hadn’t worked all that time just to play against the top teams in Germany. Whose goal was that? You had to go to America. This is where my future is, you said.

Your answer gained a bit of confidence when it was relayed to viewers by play-by-play announcer Dan Shulman. The truth was, you didn’t know how good you were, and that was why you went—to see. It was a chance, your only one, really, to go up against high-level competition, players your age who were actually trying, and measure how you stacked up.

You were in the third year of a five-year plan, so it was a good time to benchmark your progress. Your coach and mentor (and second father and agent and best friend), Holger Geschwindner, had told you at the beginning, three weeks after you started working together, If you want to be the best player in Germany, we can stop practicing right now. If you want to be with the best guys in the world, we have to practice every day. It’s a major decision, but you have to make it. To show your commitment, you got your driver’s license and convinced your parents to buy you a white Volkswagen Rabbit so you could drive an hour each way from Würzburg to train with Holger at the Abtenberghalle in Rattelsdorf. (The Abtenberghalle’s name makes it sound much grander than what it was, as you know: a tiny gym with a corrugated metal roof and industrial white paint job. It was a shed with a hardwood floor.)

Your parents had already given you much more than a car and the encouragement to pursue your dream. Your mother, the former Helga Bredenbröcker, was a member of the team that represented West Germany at EuroBasket Women 1966 in Romania. A bank-shot specialist is how she would describe her game later. Your father, Jörg-Werner, played handball for the country’s national team; basketball wasn’t thought of as a sport for a man, or at least Jörg-Werner didn’t think of it that way, or at least he didn’t then. The product of those two sets of genes—Helga is five foot ten, Jörg-Werner around six foot one—you were probably destined for some level of athletic achievement.

Your first sport was tennis. Like many Germans, Helga and Jörg-Werner had picked up rackets following the Grand Slam successes of Steffi Graf and Boris Becker. You started playing with your parents when you were young, before you were even in grade school, and rose to become a nationally ranked player on the junior circuit. Eventually, though, you grew too tall for the game, twice the height of some of your opponents. By then, you were more interested in basketball, anyway, after seeing the U.S. Men’s National Team, a.k.a. the Dream Team, at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

You started hanging around where the X-Rays played when you were fourteen. That’s where a youth coach noticed you, saw your height and the way you moved, and said you could be the next Toni Kukoč, the Croatian star who would soon go on to play with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls during their second trio of championships. But the possibility of that happening seemed unlikely—the history of German players in the NBA could fit on a book jacket. There was Detlef Schrempf, who was well-known enough to later play himself on Parks & Recreation and have a really good Band of Horses song named after him. He made the All-NBA third team in 1995, three All-Star games, and was the Sixth Man of the Year twice. But who else was there? The idea of playing in the same league as Jordan and his Dream Team teammates—or, like Kukoč, on the same team—was less a fantasy than a delusion. So you were tall. So what?

It didn’t help that, though you had inherited your athleticism from both sides, when it came to temperament, you were much more like your mother (a pessimist) than your father (the eternal optimist). But you kept playing, kept growing, and that brought you to the attention of Holger. He was in his late forties then, but still competitive, six foot four and in shape, playing on a senior team. He first saw you while waiting for a game in Schweinfurt and was struck by a tall, skinny kid running around the court, raw and unpolished but practically vibrating with potential.

He did a lot of things right, Holger told me in 2009, "what a good basketball player is able to do, but he had no technical skills. No shooting. No dribbling. But you could see that the guy had a sense for the game. We shared the same locker room, so I said, ‘Hey, who is teaching you the tools?’ And he said, ‘Nobody.’ So I said, ‘If you want, we can do it.’

Three weeks later, we played a game in Würzburg. He and his parents and his sister were there. After the game, Helga came over and said, ‘Hey, Dirk told us you offered to practice with him. Can we do that?’ So we started the next day.

Holger, the former captain of the West German team at the 1972 Munich Olympics, had unorthodox methods for building you into the best possible basketball player he could. Do they still seem as strange as they did then? He taught you precise shooting mechanics—around that time, in 1995, he believed he had discovered the optimal angle for releasing a jumpshot, sixty degrees—but he also had you rowing, skating (on ice and off), playing tennis, fencing, doing calisthenics, and learning to play the saxophone. Among other things.

The main problem, Holger told me, was I had never been educated in teaching like this in sports. I loved the sport and I played first division until I was fortysomething. But I wanted to find out whether I’m able to transport all that knowledge to kids. He was playing for the youth team, in the second division, so nobody was really watching what was going on. We stayed to our program. We had a pretty theoretical approach. We didn’t have to look what the other guys were doing.

It was unusual but effective. In one tournament, you led a select team of kids from Würzburg against the Netherlands’ U-22 national team, and you scored your side’s first twenty-eight points. The opponents always knew what was coming but could not prevent it, your team’s coach, Klaus Perneker, recalled a few years ago in an interview with Vice. (The Würzburg kids won the game and took first place overall.) After you had a good game in France for Germany’s U-18 team, American college coaches started calling your house. By September 1997, you were already enough of a known quantity—perhaps the best player in Germany, certainly the best young player in the country—that you were picked for a team that would play a couple of exhibition games against a traveling squad of NBA players, led by Charles Barkley and Scottie Pippen, under the banner of Nike NBA Hoop Heroes. What had seemed so far off was suddenly RIGHT THERE.

Barkley, whose play with the Dream Team inspired you to wear No. 14 (which you later transposed to 41 when you joined the Mavericks and guard Robert Pack wouldn’t give it up), and Pippen, whose poster was on your wall—two actual Dream Teamers, teammates of Jordan, NBA superstars, future Hall of Famers. There were others—Jason Kidd, Reggie Miller, Vin Baker, coming off his first All-NBA team and already a three-time All-Star—but those two were enough. Just being on the court with them was enough.

And it couldn’t have gone any better. The games were just exhibitions, but they showed you that maybe it was possible. They weren’t letting you score all those points. Maybe a few business decisions were being made—it was September in Berlin and there were no names on the front of the jerseys, just Nike swooshes—but pride wouldn’t allow these guys, these grown-ass men, to let an eighteen-year-old kid with a buzz cut score at will on them. And you were doing it anyway. The clips on YouTube show you skinnier and bouncier and wearing No. 78, but your silhouette cuts through the decades, your jumper identical, the results the same.

How many times have you heard Barkley talk about that game? He changes the story a bit the more he tells it—and he’s told it plenty—but he’s remained pretty consistent on the amount you scored during one of those games. (Dirk scored a smooth fifty points, he told me in 2009; a decade later, he’d upped it to fifty-two.) He was too big for Scottie Pippen and, I forget, we had another really good defender—I can’t remember who it was at the time—and he just whooped their ass. After the game, he approached you and said that however much money it would cost to convince you to go to Auburn, his alma mater, he would pay it himself.

At the time, you were considering coming to the United States to attend college for a year or two. Three dozen universities had officially registered their interest, and those were just the ones that thought they had a shot at getting you on their campus. There were two front-runners. Ben Braun had been chasing you pretty much since the moment he took the head coaching job at Cal. Kentucky wanted you, too. You would have helped the Wildcats defend the title they won in San Antonio, the day after your appearance at the Hoop Summit.

But the Hoop Summit proved—maybe not to you yet, maybe not to Holger or your parents, but absolutely to everyone else—that there wasn’t much you could learn in college, at least not on the court.

Remember what Holger told you before that game in San Antonio?

He said: Every time you get the ball, take it to the rim and try to dunk it. And if they knock you down, do it again. And again. They cannot get the courage out of you.

It was 10–4 and the World team could barely get the ball over the half-court line, much less get into anything resembling an offense. Finally, you got the ball on the right wing and caught your defender, Jason Capel, leaning the wrong way. You took it hard to the lane with your left hand; you always liked doing that. JaRon Rush—who would go on to play at UCLA but is probably better known as the older brother of future NBA players Kareem and Brandon—got there too late to do anything other than foul you as you attempted a two-handed dunk, just like Holger said.

As you went to the line, your stats for the X-Rays flashed on the screen: 30.0 points, 16.0 rebounds, 9.0 assists. They were so outrageous they felt made up—I know Germans are efficient, but not to the point of perfectly divisible statistics—and maybe they were. You don’t have to tell me. I will say that the assists number especially seemed like wishful thinking on someone’s part.

But as the game wore on, it was clear that if the numbers on the screen were just something that you or Holger wrote down before the game, a guesstimate for the ESPN broadcast crew, they were representative of what you were capable of at just nineteen years old. Just like in the exhibitions against the Nike barnstorming team in Berlin, the version of you we all know is easily recognizable in this game, the strange number (you wore 15 in San Antonio) the only detail that would give anyone pause. You ended up with thirty-three points and fourteen rebounds, the former a record that lasted until 2010 when Enes Kanter scored thirty-four. A handful of U.S. players fouled out trying to stop your repeated forays to the hoop. You looked like the player a Cal assistant would compare to Pippen: He’s long, lean, and he’s got the first step.

It was just one game, but it was enough. If you went by that tape alone, Larry Bird told Sports Illustrated, you’d think he’s one of the best ever.

(I will admit that I did not see the game until years later, not until you were well on the way to making Bird’s words a reality. I had just gotten to Dallas then, a few weeks earlier. The night after the Hoop Summit, I went to see Radiohead and Spiritualized perform at the Music Hall at Fair Park, which normally hosts touring musicals—my parents took me and my sister to see them when we were kids—so it was an appropriately theatrical venue. Radiohead was on their OK Computer tour, and it was arguably the best possible time to see them, as their ambition was leading them to redefine what rock music could be, but they were still beholden to at least some of its conventions. You could see where they were headed (Nude, which would show up on 2007’s In Rainbows, made its full-band debut at that show) but they weren’t there yet. As far as scouting went, I was much more interested, at the time, in what the future looked like for Thom Yorke and company rather than for the Mavericks, who were finishing up a decade of letting me and everyone else in Dallas down. And if you went by that concert alone, you’d think they were one of the best ever.